Santorum Sees Long Campaign Road Ahead, but Many See Dead End

Rick Santorum held Nikolai Howe, 5, while campaigning on Wednesday in Carnegie, Pa., after three primary losses on Tuesday.Credit
Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

In public, Rick Santorum brushes off the messages from party leaders and rising numbers of conservative voters that the Republican race is all but over, that his campaign has entered its end game.

But advisers to Mr. Santorum acknowledged on Wednesday that the road ahead is much steeper and more potholed now after Mitt Romney’s three-primary sweep on Tuesday.

More significant than the delegates that Mr. Romney accrued this week are the warnings flashing “Danger” in voter surveys that some of Mr. Santorum’s conservative base may be turning away.

Voters in Wisconsin on Tuesday who identified themselves as “very conservative” — a group Mr. Santorum has easily carried in previous states — split their support with Mr. Romney. And only about one in four Santorum voters believed he would be the nominee, according to surveys of people leaving polls.

Mr. Santorum remains a major distraction for Mr. Romney, forcing him to campaign hard in future primary states and spend precious treasure.

But on Wednesday Mr. Santorum faced a new round of calls to bow out. Senator John McCain of Arizona urged him to make a “graceful exit” because his candidacy had become “irrelevant.”

Haley Barbour, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, who has been circumspect about endorsing a candidate, said in an interview that Mr. Romney would be the nominee, “barring his stepping on a landmine.”

“The numbers indicate that there’s some movement among conservatives to coalesce behind Romney,” he said. “That’s really the final hurdle.”

While Mr. Santorum argues, more or less correctly, that the nominating fight is only at “halftime,” with many more contests to go and hundreds of delegates to be selected, the narrative of Mr. Romney’s inevitable nomination portends difficulties in raising money, rallying Mr. Santorum’s conservative base and perhaps even holding onto his home state of Pennsylvania when it votes April 23.

“The campaign recognizes they need to re-engineer,” said Richard A. Viguerie, a direct-mail expert, who has become a regular adviser to Mr. Santorum. “You can’t keep doing what you’ve been doing in the past and expect different results.”

Tim LeFever, who organized a fund-raiser for Mr. Santorum at the Jelly Belly candy factory in California last week, said the growing sense that Mr. Romney would become the nominee made it hard to raise cash for Mr. Santorum.

“There will be certain people who will be reluctant to climb on board because they feel their dollars or their votes won’t make a difference,” Mr. LeFever said. “For quite a while there’s been a discussion — with my donation and support of Rick Santorum, is there a pathway to victory?”

Mr. Santorum and his top strategists fervently argue that there is, and that it runs through Pennsylvania and then to conservative Southern states that vote in May, including Arkansas, Kentucky and Texas.

“By the end of May, we expect this race to be very close to even,” Mr. Santorum said as the disappointing election results came in Tuesday from Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

But outside the campaign bubble, not many Republican leaders accept this view of events, and the widening delegate gap raises doubts about whether Mr. Santorum can force a brokered convention by depriving his rival of a majority before the end of the primary season.

“Few people who aren’t on the Santorum campaign payroll are left who don’t recognize that this is over,” said Jim Dyke, a former communications director of the Republican National Committee.

Mike DeWine, the attorney general of Ohio and one of the few prominent elected Republicans to endorse Mr. Santorum, still supports him, but he said many conservatives whose hearts are with Mr. Santorum “want to get this over with” and so they voted for Mr. Romney. “It’s almost a self-fulfilling prophecy,” he said.

For the moment Mr. Santorum enjoys a lead in polls in Pennsylvania, where on Wednesday he campaigned in small towns in the state’s southwest, emphasizing his cultural connections to rural voters.

But the Romney campaign has only just begun to train its sights on Mr. Santorum in his home state, kicking off a swing there Wednesday night.

“There’s three weeks to go and Romney’s organization, and the money he’ll put into the campaign are going to be formidable — I think he will close that gap,” said Jim Roddey, Republican chairman of Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh.

Mr. Romney, whose campaign and outside supporters outspent Mr. Santorum five to one on the airwaves in Wisconsin, is “going to pull out all the stops” in Pennsylvania, said Mr. Roddey, a Romney supporter. “They know if they can win in Pennsylvania they’ve really driven a stake in the Santorum campaign.”

In appealing to conservatives, Mr. Santorum has taken to drawing an analogy to 1976, when the party failed to embrace Ronald Reagan.

“Everybody told him to get out of the race,” Mr. Santorum said Tuesday night. “They said, ‘Get out of the race, we need a moderate.’ ”

But Republicans lost in November that year, and by 1980 Mr. Reagan moved the party to the right with him and rode to glory.

Mr. Santorum draws the analogy to plead with voters not to repeat the error of 1976. But some who hear him wonder if he is not also setting the stage, should President Obama win re-election, for his own attempted comeback in 2016 as the conservative leader who told people so.

In hanging on, however, he risks being seen as a candidate who failed to expand his own support beyond his core of social conservative backers and who complicated Mr. Romney’s efforts to engage directly with Mr. Obama.

“The longer Santorum stays in the race,” said Mr. Dyke, who does not support any candidate, “the further he shifts his profile from someone who exceeded expectations to a single-issue candidate — a fly in the ointment — something difficult to overcome now or in future cycles.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 5, 2012, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Santorum Sees Long Campaign Road Ahead, but Many See Dead End. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe